So much heat, so little light!

Yesterday I read through William Clancy’s “Notes on Epistemology of a Rule-based Expert System”, the sort of thing I was working on in the late 80s. In the section that’s showing he writes, “I knew what all the words meant, but I couldn’t understand why the rule was correct. … More than a decade would pass before I realized that to have a representation in your pocket is not to be intelligent.” You see, I’ve come to an understanding of how that implicates itself into society’s deliberations concerning public policy, of how it ramifies itself down into the lived experience of the citizen.

The fact is what I was talking about in the late 70s really has arisen as “e-democracy”. And the web really has enabled fabulous new ways to communicate, blogs and such. Mailists, and forums … thousands, hundreds of thousands … and hundreds of thousands and millions of people exchanging views using formats that silo their words and thoughts, never to be seen again … all that so often well motivated energy and engagement generates very little more than heat.

Nuts and Bolts VS Turnpikes and Beltways

Thinking about how the processes of publication and broadcasting relate to the dynamics of inter-personal exchange (The over-lap is so fractal it’s like stepping into a time/space discontinuity!) I realize that the mandate I imagine for Many2Many is quite distinct from, well, from what drives my “Participatory Deliberation” project. So much so that I started a seperate blog for the latter: VibeWise

I though I was on a roll, so I went on a tear. I copy the entirety here:

Beginning with foundations from VibeWise: Taking Simple Things Seriously

What does it come down to? You know … “it“.

As individuals we are story tellers. (If what you are doesn’t matter to you then you should adjust your tin-foil helmet and until you do just find a quiet place and try not to cause trouble.) That means our “internal narrative” is what runs society. (Like the little voice in your head right now that’s telling you this is hippie bullshit … or wondering what I’m going on about.)

“History” is the story that historians agree on. Made up of facts, most of the time but not always, and strung together in a way that makes some sort of sense to most people most of the time. Usually in a way that’s useful to those with the sort of clout that lets them have historians hired and fired. (“The nail that sticks up gets hammered” … the sort of thing we learn, yes? What side our bread is buttered on? Keep that in mind … it’s going to come up again.) But my point is: it’s a story. How does that matter? Well, because the sort of story that’s used to describe history (“A country we cannot travel to”) is the same sort of story that’s used as current events unfold.

Gooooooooood morning, world!

The point here will be to agglomerate Gnodal (LiveJournal), “Participatory Deliberation“, and MozDawg on DAV and Docs (blogspot).